So in effect this day Hook was burying his son in ground that touched his own and bore his name as well. Yet as he stared at it now, at the sandlike snow whipping under the coffin into the black pit beneath, he felt as if he were placing his son not in some familiar ground of home but in an alien, almost lunar soil. He had his arm around his two surviving children, sixteen-year-old Bobby on the outside and the year-younger Jennifer in between, both hugging each other, trembling and crying in the desperate grip of his arm. He himself would not cry, could not cry. He knew that if he allowed himself that luxury for even a moment he would end up falling on the casket like some poor sobbing peasant mother and that it would take men, it would take farmers like himself, to pull him free. So he held on to all he had in the world now, his two children and his rage—for there was still that, of course, and it had become his spine now, his blood and breath, his tomorrow and the next day and the day after that. As long as he had it, this treasure of rage, he could go on.

The Reverend Hodson’s voice gusted at him again, puffed and preening now, for these were the man’s own words and not his deity’s. “And O, our dear heavenly Father, our blessed Jesus, we pray that Thou wilt grant eternal peace and life everlasting to the soul of this young man, whom, as we all here today can testify, truly lived his life according to the golden rule…”

Hook, who despised bad grammar in anyone pretending to eloquence, did not hear the rest of the man’s prayer. The solecism, like a thrown rail switch, sent the train of his attention wandering off into the trees, the cemetery’s graceful old maples and dead-leaved oaks, and he observed that the wind was shifting, was southerly now. If it held, the temperature would rise in the next few days. The thin snow would melt. Christmas would not be white after all, not that it would matter to him, for where he was going it would be green.

On his left his Aunt Marian suddenly cried out and Hook, feeling Uncle Arnie struggling to hold her, realized that it was all over, the ceremony finished. The Reverend was coming around the coffin toward him, his stocky figure properly bent and condoling, though Hook thought he could see in the man’s doughy face a look of muted triumph. See? it said. You finally needed me. In the end you all need me.

Nodding, Hook thanked him but barely touched his proffered hand, for Jenny had collapsed against him and was holding onto his arm with all her strength—to keep him there, he knew, hold them both there, for to move away would be to acknowledge the finality of the thing, that their Chris, their shining splendid loved and loving Chris, was actually dead, actually lying there in that box about to be covered over with earth. To leave would be to accept that it was all not some fantastically detailed nightmare from which they would soon wake. Nevertheless Hook gently forced her away from the grave, moving slowly, holding her up, with Bobby on the other side of her—Bobby, who if anything had to feel even more bereft than they, for they at least had known where their lives had ended and Chris’s had begun. They had not all their days played with him and gone to school with him and worked with him; they had not fought for their lives with him or lain together in the warm summer nights giggling at what scatological humor Hook could only guess at, smile at, from his room across the hall. Yet Bobby helped him with Jenny as they headed toward the gate and the cars lined up outside it, along the blacktop road.